Drones, Code, AI: This Is What War Looks Like Now, From Ukraine to India

The deployment of precision weapons and AI-guided systems promises surgical strikes with minimal collateral damage—a seductive proposition that masks deeper ethical concerns.

(Photo: Kamran Akhter/The Quint)

The last few months have shown a new battlefield in play.

Modern warfare is undergoing its most profound transformation since the invention of gunpowder. From the battlefields of Ukraine to the skies over South Asia and the Middle East, conflicts that once relied on conventional armies, tanks, and artillery are increasingly dominated by drones, precision weapons, cyber attacks, and artificial intelligence.

This technological evolution is not merely changing how wars are fought—it is fundamentally challenging our understanding of warfare ethics, international law, and the very nature of armed conflict itself.

The Dawn of the Drone Age

The Russia-Ukraine war has become the first truly large-scale drone conflict in history, serving as a grim laboratory for the future of warfare. By early 2025, drones were accounting for 60 percent to 70 percent of the damage and destruction caused to Russian equipment in the war, according to the Royal United Services Institute.

Ukraine's rapid evolution from a nation with modest drone capabilities to one producing 2 million drones annually—with plans for 5 million in 2025—demonstrates how quickly military technology can be scaled and adapted.

The sophistication is equally remarkable. Ukrainian developers are now working on the next stage in the evolution of AI-driven drones. The goal is to produce a new generation of drones that utilise artificial intelligence not only at the final targeting stage, but throughout their flight. This represents a leap from remotely piloted vehicles to truly autonomous weapons systems that can select and engage targets without human intervention.

This drone revolution extends far beyond Eastern Europe. The recent India-Pakistan crisis of May 2025 marked the first instance of large-scale drone warfare in South Asia.

Reports suggest Pakistan sent over 600 drones during this time, much more than the terrorists they sneak into India.

During the intervening night of 7 and 8 May 2025, around 350–400 Pakistan-launched drones were nullified by India.

Meanwhile, Israel's June 2025 strikes on Iran showcased how through spies and artificial intelligence, the Israeli military unleashed a nighttime fusillade of warplanes and armed drones smuggled into Iran to quickly incapacitate many of its air defenses and missile systems.

Precision Without Proportionality

The deployment of precision weapons and AI-guided systems promises surgical strikes with minimal collateral damage—a seductive proposition that masks deeper ethical concerns.

The Israeli-Iranian conflict illustrates this paradox perfectly. Israel's military said about 200 aircraft were involved in the initial attack on about 100 targets. Its Mossad spy agency positioned explosive drones and precision weapons inside Iran ahead of time, and used them to target Iranian air defences and missile launchers near Tehran.

While precision weapons can theoretically reduce civilian casualties, their very precision creates new moral hazards. The ability to strike with pinpoint accuracy anywhere in the world removes many of the practical constraints that historically limited warfare.

When a suicide drone can be programmed to identify and destroy a specific radar installation from hundreds of kilometers away, the traditional friction of war—the logistical challenges, geographical barriers, and human limitations that once imposed natural restraints on conflict—evaporates.

The India-Pakistan drone exchanges reveal another troubling dimension: the normalisation of cross-border violations. India clearly targeted the terrorist infrastructure in Pakistan with drones. Deploying drones represents a lower-level military option and is generally employed as the least escalatory step.

The Cyber Dimension

Cyber warfare adds another layer of complexity to modern conflicts. Iran could also mount a cyber offensive against Israel, because there is a record of it doing so successfully in 2023, when it shut down electricity in some Israeli hospitals.

Unlike kinetic weapons, cyber attacks can be launched anonymously, with plausible deniability, and can target civilian infrastructure directly while causing minimal physical damage.

The integration of cyber capabilities with traditional warfare creates new vulnerabilities and escalation risks. When Ukrainian forces conducted the first fully unmanned operation near Lyptsi, a village north of Kharkiv, they relied on networks that can be compromised. When India and Pakistan exchanged drone strikes, they simultaneously engaged in electronic warfare to jam communications and disrupt navigation systems.

The AI Acceleration

Perhaps most concerning is the role of artificial intelligence in accelerating the pace of conflict.

Ukraine hopes a rollout of AI-enabled drones across the front line will help it overcome increasing signal jamming by the Russians as well as enable unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to work in larger groups. The development cycle for drone technology in Ukraine has compressed to just 3-4 months, meaning military advantages can shift rapidly and unpredictably.

This acceleration creates what military strategists call "the OODA loop compression"—the time between observation, orientation, decision, and action shrinks to near-instantaneous levels.

When autonomous systems can process information and make targeting decisions faster than humans can intervene, we approach a threshold where human control over warfare becomes nominal rather than real.

Ethical Crossroads

These technological developments challenge fundamental principles of international humanitarian law.

The principle of distinction—the requirement to differentiate between combatants and civilians—becomes complicated when AI systems make targeting decisions based on pattern recognition that may misidentify civilians.

The principle of proportionality, ensuring that anticipated military advantage outweighs expected civilian harm, is difficult to calculate when autonomous systems can strike multiple targets simultaneously.

The proliferation of these technologies also democratises destructive capabilities. For one million dollars, you can buy 10,000 drones, put four grenades on each, and they will kill 1,000 or even 2,000 people or destroy 200 tanks, as a Ukrainian electronic warfare expert noted. This cost-effectiveness makes advanced military capabilities accessible to non-state actors and smaller nations, potentially destabilising traditional power balances.

Redefining Deterrence

The Ukraine-Russia conflict, India-Pakistan crisis, and Israel-Iran confrontations all occurred between nuclear-armed states, suggesting that nuclear deterrence may be less effective in preventing limited technological warfare.

Nuclear deterrence does not guarantee strategic stability. Despite deterrence and confidence-building measures, modernisation and high-alert postures mean there's little margin for error in future conflicts.

The question becomes whether these new forms of warfare represent escalation control or escalation acceleration. Drones and cyber attacks offer the illusion of limited conflict, with ways to inflict damage while avoiding full-scale war. But they also create new pathways for miscalculation, particularly when autonomous systems operate faster than human decision-making cycles.

The Path Forward

The technological transformation of warfare demands equally transformative approaches to arms control, international law, and military ethics.

Current treaties and conventions were designed for an era of human-controlled weapons and clearly defined battlefields. They struggle to address autonomous weapons, cyber warfare, and conflicts that span multiple domains simultaneously.

Three urgent priorities emerge:

1. The international community must develop new legal frameworks for autonomous weapons systems, including clear requirements for meaningful human control over lethal decisions.

2. Nations must establish cyber warfare norms that protect civilian infrastructure while allowing legitimate military operations.

3. The pace of technological development requires new approaches to arms control that can adapt to rapid innovation cycles.

The conflicts in Ukraine, South Asia, and the Middle East are not just regional disputes—they are previews of warfare's future. How the international community responds to these technological challenges will determine whether the digital transformation of warfare enhances security and stability or accelerates us toward a more dangerous and unpredictable world.

The choices we make about regulating these technologies today will shape the conflicts of tomorrow.

As precision weapons, AI, and cyber capabilities continue to evolve, there arises a fundamental question: can human wisdom and international cooperation including laws and regulations keep pace with technological capability?

The answer will determine whether the new face of war serves humanity's interests or humanity becomes servant to the inexorable logic of technological conflict. The time for difficult choices is now—before the technologies advance beyond our capacity to control them.

(Subimal Bhattacharjee is a Visiting Fellow at Ostrom Workshop, Indiana University Bloomington, USA, and a cybersecurity specialist. This is an opinion piece. The views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)